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Our November/December 2022 issue has been printed and is going out to print subscribers very soon, and e-subscribers have already gotten their electronic copies. (Not a subscriber? You can get a print or e-subscription online here.) Débora Nunes’s cover story on reproductive justice and the workplace is posted on the website. And here is the p. 2 editors’ note for the issue:
Among the many reasons to feel relieved about the results of the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, whose results are coming in as we go to press, were several victories
on abortion rights, including successful ballot measures in Vermont, California, and Michigan that enshrined abortion rights in state constitutions, and the defeat of anti-abortion measures in Kentucky and Montana.
But as Débora Nunes argues in this issue’s cover story, legal measures to protect abortion rights fall short in protecting reproductive freedom, just as Roe v. Wade did all along, which can be seen most clearly when we examine class divisions in U.S. workplaces. Nunes draws on work in feminist economics to explore the tangle of interests that employers and governments have in women’s reproductive lives and explores the gap between upper-class and working-class women in the area of reproductive justice.
Robert Ovetz’s comment in this issue helps explain why neither the courts nor legislation at the federal level can be expected to protect the interests of working-class people in the United States: the U.S. Constitution, among its famous “checks and balances,” has always provided a ruling-class “minority check” against the interests of the working-class majority. This explains why, when the Inflation Reduction Act finally passed, it was a shadow of the original Build Back Better agenda that President Biden had initially proposed
For Ovetz, the built-in class bias in the U.S. Constitution means that change can only come about when we “stop playing by their rules.” This is exactly the path the activists profiled in Saurav Sarkar’s feature on wage theft are pursuing. Wage theft, which Sarkar defines as “any situation in which an employer does not pay a worker what they are due in wages or benefits,” is already against the law, but enforcement is so lax that many employers rely on it as part of their business model. Groups like the Naujawan Support Network in Toronto and Arise Chicago use extra-legal tactics, like direct negotiation with employers, “naming and shaming,” and trying to create a “culture of compliance,” to change employer behavior.
That a system that is biased toward corporations and employers and a legal system that looks the other way when employers steal from workers would generate high rates of poverty is no surprise; Ed Ford’s “Economy in Numbers” column in this issue documents the state of poverty in the United States. The themes of poverty and power run through the articles in the rest of the issue: John Miller’s column on the debates over globalization, including how neoliberal globalization affected inequality within and among countries; Rick Girling’s feature on public banking and climate change; Paddy Quick’s review of Marianne T. Hill’s new book Building a Solidarity Society; and Arthur MacEwan’s column on the “economic deprivations and indignities” the people of Puerto Rico continue to face.